Become What You Are

JULIANA HATFIELD, best known as (a) Evan Dando's sometime girlfriend (b) bassist on the best Lemonheads' album (c) former Blake Baby (d) anorexic (e) the woman who's earned the questionable accolade 'arch-babe' and (f) coolest of the collection of female musicians dubbed the 'new neurotics', is back!

Last year's Hey Babe was pretty good. Become What You Are is far more consistent. It may be due to the fact that she's found the right musicians - Dean Fisher on bass and Todd Philips on drums, along with assistance from the dBs' Peter Holsapple on keyboards - but she's become adept at writing slacker songs just as sweet, as dumb and as rocking as the Lemonheads.

Her lyrics can justifiably be described as simplistic, although there's often something lurking underneath that you wouldn't quite expect. When an interviewer commended her recently for 'Supermodel', which begins with references to "the highest paid piece of ass" and ends "I wish she'd trade places with me", Juliana explained that she only wanted to trade places so she could suffer for her. This is, remember, the woman Evan described as the purest person he had ever met.

Just as on Hey Babe, she could write that Nirvana made her "wanna fuck stuff up" and make it sound like the most extraordinary praise anyone could ever receive, so on Become What You Are she can sing stuff like "I miss my sister, where did she go/She would have taken me to my first all-ages show/It was the Violent Femmes and the Del Fuegos" and "I love my sister, she's the best/She's cooler than any girl I have ever met" and sound close to tears.

Her voice is cute and girlish, sure, but she can still sound vaguely menacing while she flails her guitar about on 'A Dame With A Rod' or 'Addicted'. If none of the songs quite recapture the melodic thrill of the Blake Babies' 'Out There', 'Spin The Bottle', 'Feelin' Massachussets' and 'This Is The Sound' get within spitting distance.

The day may well be at hand when Evan will be referred to as "that long haired, dim-witted bloke who used to have the good fortune to snog Juliana Hatfield".

• Lorraine Freeney